Group

by Christie Tate

  “Do you want to say more?”

  “I’m not praying that you die.”

  * * *

  If you Google “see Buddha kill,” you’ll find a link to a book titled If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients. Apparently, psychotherapy patients, who were now my people, must learn that therapists are nothing more than struggling human beings like their patients. It was an early signal that Dr. Rosen was not going to give me answers, that he might not have them to give. I added to my fantasy reel of Dr. Rosen’s grisly demise an image of me driving a wooden stake into Dr. Rosen’s heart, which was unsettling, and not just because I’d confused Buddha with Dracula.

  Freshman year of college, some lively, popular girls from Austin invited me to road-trip to New Orleans with them. The plan was to stay at one of the girls’ cousin’s place and party in the French Quarter until it was time to drive back to campus. I told them I needed to think about it, even though I knew my answer. I cited homework as an excuse, even though it was the second week of school, and my only assignment was to read the first half of Beowulf, which I’d read in high school.

  Groups intimidated me, even all those years after Bianca and her Jolly Ranchers. Where would I sleep in New Orleans? What if I didn’t understand their jokes? What if we ran out of things to say? What if they figured out I wasn’t as rich or cool or happy as they were? What if they found out I wasn’t a virgin? What if they knew I’d slept with only one guy? What if they learned my secrets around food?

  How could I possibly do a group with the same people every week?

  “I know you. From meetings.” I blurted it out in the middle of my second session. I was afraid that he would one day remember me and then have to kick me out of his practice because we’d sat in meetings together. “From years ago when I lived in Hyde Park.”

  He cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “Ah, right. I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Does this mean you can’t treat me?”

  His shoulders shook as he burst into elfin laughter. “I hear the wish.”

  “What?” I stared at his jolly face.

  “If you’re thinking about committing to treatment with me, you’re going to start coming up with excuses about why it won’t work.”

  “It was a legitimate fear.”

  More laughter.

  “What?”

  “If you join one of my groups, I want you to tell the group every single thing you remember me sharing during meetings.”

  “But your anonymity—”

  “I don’t need you to protect me. That’s not your job. Your job is to tell.”

  My journal entry after the second session was strangely prescient: I feel nervous about being exposed in therapy about the way I eat… I’ve got a lot of emotion about Dr. Rosen & his role in my life. Fear about my secrets coming out. Fear is so huge.

  Dr. Rosen spoke in koans.

  “The starving person isn’t hungry until she takes her first bite,” he said.

  “I’m not anorexic.” Oh, sure, I’d wished for an attack of anorexia all through high school when I couldn’t stop bingeing on Pringles and Chips Ahoy, but that was never my deal.

  “It’s a metaphor. When you let the group in—take that first bite—only then will you feel how alone you’ve been.”

  “How do I ‘let the group in’?”

  “You share with them every aspect of your life that deals with relationships—friendship, family, sex, dating, romance. All of it.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s how you let them in.”

  * * *

  Before starting group, you got three individual sessions. In my last one, my shoulders relaxed as I curled into Dr. Rosen’s black leather armchair. I twirled my bracelet with my index finger and slipped my foot in and out of my shoe. I was used to Dr. Rosen; he was my strange old pal. Nothing to fear here. I’d told him that I knew him from meetings, and he said it wasn’t a deal breaker. The only thing left was to hammer out the particulars, like which group would he put me in? He offered a Tuesday morning coed group full of doctors and lawyers that met from seven thirty to nine. A “professionals” group. I hadn’t been picturing men in my group. Or doctors. Or lawyers.

  “Wait, what’s going to happen to me when I start group?”

  “You’re going to feel lonelier than you ever have in your life.”

  “Hold the phone, Harvard.” I bolted straight up in my chair. “I’m going to feel worse?” I’d just met with the dean of students at law school to take out a private health-care loan at 10 percent interest to pay for my new therapy. Now he was telling me that group would make me feel worse than the morning I drove around dribbling plum juice and praying for a bullet to my brain?

  “Absolutely.” He nodded like he was trying to knock something off the top of his head. “If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.” Could I go through this? Did I want to? Curiosity about this man, his groups, and how they might score my heart inched out my resistance, but just barely.

  “Can I call you to let you know?”

  He shook his head. “I need your commitment today.”

  I gulped, stared at the door, and considered my options. The commitment scared me, but I was more afraid of walking out of his office empty-handed: no group, no other options, no hope.

  “Fine. I commit.” I grabbed my purse so I could slink back to work and fret over what I’d just committed to. “One last question. What’s going to happen to me when I start group?”

  “All of your secrets are going to come out.”

  4

  “Top or bottom?” A portly, balding guy with giant green eyes and wire-rimmed glasses lobbed this opening salvo at me during my first group session. Later, I learned that the guy who started my hazing was Carlos, a sharp-tongued gay doctor in his late thirties who’d been seeing Dr. Rosen for a few years.

  “In sex. Top or bottom?” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Rosen shifting his gaze from one member to another, like a sprinkler on a timer. I smoothed the front of my skirt. If they wanted bawdy, sex-positive Christie, I’d serve her up.

  “Definitely top.”

  Of course, this Christie was a fabricated version of me who welcomed intrusive questions from strangers with a smile. Underneath my skittering nerves and accelerated pulse, I felt like crying because the authentic answer to the question was that I had no idea how I liked to have sex. I didn’t date guys capable of consistent sex, thanks to their depression and addiction. I said top because I had a foggy memory of pleasure with my high school boyfriend, the basketball star slash pothead who boned me regularly in the front seat of my dad’s Chevy.

  Dr. Rosen did a theatrical throat clear.

  “What?” It was the first time I looked straight at Dr. Rosen since group started. He’d opened the waiting room door and led me, Carlos, and two other people to a corner office on the opposite end of the hallway from the room where’d I’d had my individual sessions. In the fourteen-by-fourteen group room, there were seven swivel chairs arranged in a circle. Sunlight striped the room from the slats in the mini blinds. In one corner there was a bookshelf, lined with titles on addiction, codependency, alcoholism, and group therapy. On the bottom shelf, a motley assortment of stuffed animals and a nun with boxing gloves spilled over the edge. I’d selected a chair facing the door, which was nine o’clock to Dr. Rosen’s high noon position. The chair was hard on my ass and squeaked faintly when I swiveled left and right. Honestly, I’d expected spiffier accommodations from a Harvard alum.

  “How about an honest answer?” Dr. Rosen said. His grin broadcast a challenge, like he knew without a doubt I’d begun my group career masquerading as a sexually healthy woman.

  “Such as?”

  “That
you don’t like having sex at all.” My face flushed. That was not how I would have described myself.

  “That’s not true. I love having sex, I just can’t find anyone to have sex with.” I’d had orgasms and toe-curling sex before—in college there was that Colombian alcoholic who touched my face as he kissed me, lighting me up like a supernova. And I genuinely liked being on top those few times with my high school boyfriend, tilting my pelvis just so, charging forward into my sexuality as only a drunk-on-Zima seventeen-year-old could. I didn’t know where those buried parts of me went or why I couldn’t hold on to them.

  A grandpa-aged guy with a military buzz cut and a Colonel Sanders goatee—a retired proctologist—piped in. “A pretty girl like you? That can’t be true.” Was he leering at me?

  “Guys don’t… respond to me.” Tears threatened. Two minutes into the session, and I was cracking. I remembered when my all-girls Catholic high school sent us on a spiritual retreat sophomore year, and my retreat leader opened with a story about her bulimic past. I responded by bursting into tears and confessing my bulimia to a roomful of fourteen-year-olds, whom I then swore to secrecy. It was the first time I’d told anyone about my purging. Sitting across from Colonel Sanders, I felt the confusion from the retreat sidle up next to me, hovering: Would opening my mouth to spill the truth to strangers salvage my life or would it destroy me as my mother predicted?

  “What do you mean, ‘respond’?” Colonel Sanders was definitely leering.

  “Guys always approach my friends, but never me. It’s been like that since high school.” In co-ed groups at bars or parties, I would stand slightly off to the side, never sure what to do with my hands, finding it impossible to laugh in my normal pitch or join the conversation because I was trying to imagine how to get the guys to like me. It wasn’t just American guys. My college roommate Kat and I traveled all over Europe after college, and not one single guy hit on me. Not even in Italy. Meanwhile, guys from Munich, Nice, Lucerne, and Bruges fell all over Kat and ignored me.

  A buzzer rang, and Dr. Rosen pressed a button on the wall behind him.

  Three seconds later, a smiling woman in her late forties with chipped turquoise nail polish, overprocessed orange hair, and a raspy smoker’s voice walked in. Her fringy rayon shirt was more Woodstock than downtown Chicago. I’d seen her a few times in 12-step meetings. “I’m Rory,” she said to me and another older guy sitting across from me, who was apparently new to the group as well. Like a den mother, she pointed everyone out and told us their names and occupations. Colonel Sanders’s given name was Ed. Carlos, a dermatologist. Patrice, a partner in an obstetrics practice. Rory was a civil rights attorney. The new guy, Marty, had Groucho Marx eyebrows and a habit of sniffing every ten seconds. He introduced himself as a psychiatrist who worked with Southeast Asian refugees.

  “So you’re here to have more sex?” Colonel Sanders said.

  I shrugged. Literally, moments before I admitted as much, but now I was backing away because of messages embedded in my marrow: Nice girls don’t want it. Feminists don’t need it. Good girls don’t talk about it at all, especially in mixed company. My mother would die if she knew I was talking about it with these strangers.

  From there, the conversation ping-ponged to Rory, who mentioned she’d asked her father for money to pay her bills. Dr. Rosen steered Rory to her father’s Holocaust survival story, which involved hiding in a trunk in Poland for several years. Abruptly, the conversation pivoted to Carlos’s patient who refused to pay his bill.

  As the group zigzagged from issue to issue, I shifted from butt cheek to butt cheek on that hard-ass chair. I sighed and cleared my throat in frustration. Nothing was resolved. Didn’t anyone want any answers? Resolutions? Worse, as the newcomer, I had no context for any of the stories. Why did Carlos’s assistant quit? Why did Rory seem so anti-Semitic when her dad survived the Holocaust in a footlocker? What was the deal with her overdue Visa bill?

  At some point in the session I fingered the beads of my pearl bracelet like a rosary strand to soothe myself. Dr. Rosen watched me, his newest lab rat. Would he later write a note for my file? CT manipulates jewelry with her digits during group discussion. CT demonstrates all the classic signs of someone with major intimacy issues, severe repression. Tough case.

  I’d left my three individual sessions feeling that, despite his cockiness and strange sense of humor, Dr. Rosen and I had a bond. I believed he understood me, but now it felt like we were total strangers. I called him an asshole in my head.

  There were unwritten group rules.

  “You crossed your legs,” Colonel Sanders said. I stared down at my right thigh crossed over my left. Everyone turned toward me.

  “So what?” I asked, defensive.

  “We don’t do that here.” Colonel Sanders eyed my legs. I uncrossed them quickly.

  “Why not?” If making me feel stupid was a way to get better, I’d be cured by Christmas.

  “It means you’re not open.” That was Carlos.

  “It means you’re ashamed.” That was Rory.

  “You’re shutting down emotionally.” That was Patrice.

  The group room was a fishbowl. There was nowhere to hide from the six pairs of eyes around the circle. They could read my body. Make assessments. Draw conclusions. They could see me. The exposure made me want to cross my legs until the end of the session. Until the end of time.

  Dr. Rosen came to life and spoke. “What are you feeling?”

  Instead of blurting out a bullshit answer that I thought would win me points—I feel empowered by the group dynamics—I took a breath and searched for the truth. I’d lost my bearings, but decided that the truth could function like a home base. It had worked in 12-step meetings—I was alive because I’d told the truth about my bulimia over and over in meetings. Nothing in my life had empowered me—not good grades, not a thin body, not dry-humping a beautiful Latin fraternity boy—like speaking the raw truth about vomiting up my meals. The first true, full-bodied sensation of power I ever felt was after my first 12-step meeting when I sat on a bench with a woman from the meeting and told her that I’d been bingeing and purging food I’d stolen all over campus. I felt the power of turning my back on my mother’s proscription about telling other people my business. I released a secret, not caring who in my family might abandon me, because I finally understood that keeping the secret was an act of abandoning myself. If there was a way to health in group therapy—and I wasn’t sure there was—the foundation had to be built on truth. There was no other way. And none of these people knew my mother or any of her friends. So no more fronting.

  “Defensive.” How was I supposed to know that we don’t cross our legs?

  Dr. Rosen shook his head. “That’s not a feeling.”

  “But that’s exactly…” Now I was pissed, and I was positive that was a feeling.

  Another rule: “Feelings have two syllables or less: ashamed, angry, lonely, hurt, sad, afraid—” Dr. Rosen explained feelings like Fred Rogers talking to a preschooler. Apparently, once you veer beyond two syllables, you are intellectualizing, effectively darting away from the simple truth of your feelings.

  “And happy,” Rory said.

  “But you won’t feel that in here,” Carlos said. Everyone laughed. The corners of my mouth rose in a smile.

  Dr. Rosen nodded in my direction. “So what’s ‘defensive’?”

  My first pop quiz. I wanted to give the right answer. It felt as hard as figuring out Sheldon’s conference on the LSAT practice test. I ran through the roster of feelings. Frustrated came to mind, but that was three syllables. Furious? Nope, three syllables. Three blind mice. Three times the cock crowed. Three times Jesus fell. Three was holy. Three was biblical. Why couldn’t I use a three-syllable word? My top choice: adios.

  “Angry?” I said.

  “I heard something else. How about shame?”

  I said it aloud: “Ashamed?”

  I thought of shame as something survivors of incest or ritual
abuse had to work through. Shame belonged to people who had committed grave sexual sins or who did embarrassing things in public while naked. Did it belong to me? I always wore my clothes, even to bed—I often wore a bra during sex. Was shame the word for the feeling that everything about me was wrong and had to be buried under perfect test scores? Is shame what I felt as a little girl in ballet class when I pined for a petite body like the Jennifers and Melissas? Was that the name of the body disgust I felt in my gut growing up when I sat next to my friends and my younger sister, and compared the vast expanse of my thighs with their delicate, birdlike bones?

  I wanted to be valedictorian in therapy like I was in law school. The problem with being number one, of course, was that it didn’t cure my loneliness or bring me one inch closer to other people. Then there was the fact that I hadn’t a clue how to be “good” at group therapy.

  The cardinal rule in Rosen-land, of course, was no secret keeping among group members, which came up when Carlos discussed a woman named Lynne who was in another Rosen group. According to Carlos, Lynne planned to leave her husband because, in part, of his erectile dysfunction. I scrunched up my nose and shot a look at Dr. Rosen. How could he allow us to talk about some innocent man’s broken penis? What if I knew him? When Marnie mentioned the no-secrets business, I didn’t realize Dr. Rosen would actually condone gossip about other patients in the middle of a session.